Hello. Goodbye. And Thank You.

by Sue Bass

With this issue, the Belmont Citizens Forum Newsletter welcomes its third editor (in 16½ years of publication), John DiCocco. Though now a resident of West Medford, John and his wife, Connie, lived in Belmont for more than 30 years and sent three children through the Belmont school system. He is a graduate of Union College and the Boston University College of Communication, and he was for nearly 20 years the publications manager and chief editor for BU’s School of Management. John has read the Newsletter for many years, since his wife was added to the mailing list after she was elected to Belmont Town Meeting in 2003.

Thank you, Meg.

John replaces Meg Muckenhoupt, who became editor in January 2004, shortly before her twin boys were born, and is taking on full-time work now that they are almost teenagers. In her more than 12 years as editor, Meg has researched topics including solar pricing and finance, Cambridge Plating pollution, flooding at the Belmont Uplands and elsewhere in town, mosquito control, the science of recycling, the reconstruction of Belmont’s business districts and the Trapelo Road corridor, traffic and parking challenges, the Fernald property in Waltham, dredging at Blair Pond, daylighting streams, and the North Cambridge housing boom that crowds the Alewife Reservation. She has also corralled scores of volunteers to write, edit, and illustrate the Newsletter. We will miss her.

Thank you, Sharon.

This is also a time to salute Sharon Vanderslice, who decided in the fall of 1999 that the Belmont Citizens Forum needed a newsletter and created it, beginning with the January 2000 issue. For four years, she set a standard for a serious approach to town controversies, accurate science, graceful writing, and design.

Sue Bass is director emerita of the Belmont Citizens Forum and a town resident.